The American losses, especially the one soldier who had been killed, were too humiliating

[meliss]

Hi, I wonder why "the one soldier who had been killed" was especially humiliating compared to other ten americans who were also killed.

"On September 2, a truck bomb blasted “green village,” a compound where US and foreign officials and contractors quartered. Ten Americans were killed and another four were wounded, in addition to five Afghan civilians killed and 119 wounded. Another suicide bombing near the US Embassy on September 5 killed one US soldier, a Romanian soldier, and ten Afghan civilians. Forty-two Afghan civilians were wounded. The same day, just south of Kabul in Logar, a suicide car bomb against a US base wounded nine US soldiers and killed four Afghans. In the course of a week, 24 Americans were killed or wounded... Trump was enraged... The American losses, especially the one soldier who had been killed, were too humiliating."

Source: The American War in Afghanistan by Carter Malkasian

 

[emsr2d2]

The suggestion is that it's the fact that that American was a soldier that made it more humiliating for Trump. All the other Americans were civilians.

 

[Skrej]

It's not that the soldier's life was of more value than the civilians, but rather the location of the soldier who was killed. Such a soldier would be considered a 'hard' target - someone who's professionally trained, in a relatively more secure location, and supposedly more difficult to eliminate.

Compared to a 'soft target' - i.e. random civilians who have no training and little to no protection and are relatively easy to target, getting a bomb through security at the embasy and elminating a soldier (likely one of the very people providing said security), the hard target had greater significance because it was more embarrassing to the US as a failure and more of an accomplishment for the bombers.

It's relatively easy to bomb a bunch of civilians in some random location, because you can't secure every single possible place in a public location. It takes a lot more effort to sneak a bomb through a supposedly secure location in a high-profile target area where they would be on high constant alert for the possibility of attack.

Imagine you want to deface public property by spraying graffiti. Doing so in an empty dark back alley in the middle of the night isn't much of an accomplishment. Not only was it low risk, few people would ever see it. Spraying that same graffiti on the front of a police station downtown at noon in the middle of the week is a much greater accomplishment and more embarrassing to the police if you get away.